Show floor video: Gridiron Flow makes graphic workflows transparent

Among the Macworld Best in Show winners was an application I hadn't heard of before: Flow, from Gridiron Software (makers of After Effects supercharger tool Nucleo Pro). Flow is still in pre-beta, but when it ships this summer it should make the lives of graphics and production professionals much easier by exposing the various components that go into complex documents; you'll be able to track down your source files, roll back to previous versions and perform "super collects" to grab all the files you need for final output in one package.

We got a demo of Flow at Gridiron's Macworld booth; it looks very cool, and it will be exciting to see if it lives up to its promise when it's released. Video after the jump.

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Source: http://www.gridironsoftware.com/

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Macworld Software Graphic Design

Among the Macworld Best in Show winners was an application I hadn't heard of before: Flow, from Gridiron Software (makers of After Effects...

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pixelslut

Sounds like Subversion ++ . Count me in.

January 22 2008 at 2:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jake Howe

hey, i think this is a great idea, but its more for sloppy designers. as far as i understood all the big programs do a collect for output, which does all these things? including fonts and colours. i work in a printers, we get collected files all the time. nice program, no real need for it tho. i have to admit the gui is pretty slick.

January 21 2008 at 6:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Jake Howe's comment

Mark Coleran

Hey Jakus

You are quite right. Things like this do exist in major applications, such as Adobe After Effects and Adobe Indesign, but the abilities and support is far from complete. Flow tracks everything that is involved in creating a piece of work from start to finish, irrespective of application, so even if you put something together in Photoshop, it will track all the copy/pastes and drag-n-drops. As yet there has been no way of gathering all this up for transfer or archiving.

There was unfortunately only a small amount of time to show what I did to Michael at the show and there is far more to the application. Because we can track how everything is used with each other we can do things like asset protection to stop files being accidentally being deleted. Track links and prevent you breaking them and also a brand new system for versioning files automatically. Invisible and completely in the background.

Cheers

Mark

January 22 2008 at 10:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ben Englert

Wow, amazing... wish someone would do something like this for us audio folk... just in my setup you might have a Reason file, a Logic file, a bunch of tracks exported as WAVs, and then you have to push it through the masterer and out to production and stuff.

January 21 2008 at 6:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Ben Englert's comment

Mark Coleran

Hi Ben

Flow will be completely agnostic as far as applications are concerned. This means it will work for audio as well and is one of the areas we want to support (the boss is a musician). Specific support comes into play when it comes to digging into files for more information, such a layers, compositions, tracks etc, and we do intend to cover Logic and Protools.

January 22 2008 at 10:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

conigs

Way to confuse me. At first I thought you were talking about Flow from Extendmac and I was thinking... "I don't remember this being in that ftp client!"

Will there be possible trademark battles between Gridiron and Extendmac?

January 21 2008 at 5:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to conigs's comment

Chris24

I was wondering what this article was all about, because I also know Flow as an FTP client. Com'on guys, come up with a unique name! Flow's already taken. :P

January 21 2008 at 5:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael Rose

Gah! fixed. Intelliscanner video coming soon. :-)

January 21 2008 at 4:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

David

Wrong video. The one you have posted is for the Intelliscanner. Cool video though. ;-)

January 21 2008 at 4:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael P McHugh

Seems like you put the titles on the wrong video. This one if for a barcode scanner, not "Flow".

-mpm

January 21 2008 at 4:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply